Ask HN: What do you use Google Sheet or Excel for?
It is often said that where there is a spreadsheet, there is a product waiting to be built.
The more complex the spreadsheet, the more needed is the product.
The more complex the spreadsheet, the more needed is the product.
What's interesting about Sheets is that the tables can be thought of as a database with columns and records, or a CSS grid and you can put buttons and everything on it.
Currently I made a task queue for myself in sheets. There are a lot of things I want to do and I find out about these interesting stuff while in the middle of something else; so I just put the mew thing on the queue and forget about it. Works great. I also tag these tags in case I want to analyze them later.
Finally, for fun, and also shameless plug, I made a Tetris using it. It even has animation when the tiles disappear. See it here: https://plumsempy.com/2018/09/17/tetris-on-google-sheets/
It is a very powerful tool.
I left insurance years ago. My knowledge is not current. But if you want product ideas, insurance is an industry drowning in information overload and if you could figure out how to throw them a life preserver and get them to pay for it, you could potentially make a killing.
A few years ago I worked on a couple of different financial services projects that involved porting massive Excel-based jobs over to sturdier setups. Even the relatively simple spreadsheets (for people with a finance background) were long, complex projects that needed an RDBMS, an R or Python program, and a web app to do what Excel was just about handling on its own.
Generally it looks like this:
1. Get data from a central source (data warehouse/other departments)
2. Transform/combine different sources etc. (mostly with pivot tables)
3. output to a sheet
4. add some sort of automation so it runs on its own the next time